লন্ডন

London's connection with Bengali and Sylheti people stretches back more than three centuries, to the era of the East India Company and the lascar sailors who crewed its trading ships. By the 1920s, pioneering figures like Ayub Ali Master had established the coffee houses, boarding houses and welfare organisations that would anchor the community through two world wars. The post-war decades brought a sustained wave of Sylheti men who settled in Spitalfields and Whitechapel, working first in the garment factories and later building the restaurant trade that made Brick Lane a global byword for Bengali culture. Through racist violence, the liberation struggle of 1971, the housing battles of the 1970s and the political campaigns of the decades that followed, London's Bengali community showed extraordinary resilience , building institutions, winning rights, and transforming a corner of the East End into one of the most distinctive communities Britain has ever produced.